Epiphany!

Though I've been involved in drama for over three years now, I don't believe I've ever truly felt like I belonged (at least performance-wise). It's fine when I'm up on the stage with a group of people, heck I'm relaxed, but when it's just me all by my lonesome self...now that's a completely different story. Like I've said before, monologues just aren't my thing. Following last week's performances of our monologues, our teacher asked us to prepare them for a second performance in class today, and well I just didn't really have the time to prepare like I would have liked. So, there I was, back in front of the class just as unprepared as ever, but I went with it. This time I made sure that my character had some sort of background, a history before the scene started and ended. In addition to developing my character, I attempted to bring this time a physicality of my environment that apparently didn't get across in my last performance. For once, I felt completely connected to my character, body and soul. I wasn't fretting about mistakes in my lines or awkward blocking, I just went with the flow. And guess what? It worked! It worked, it worked, it worked! An overwhelmingly positive response in all aspects. Now I'm not saying that I am the epitome of an actress, but hey, I'm getting there!

C'est Vendredi!

To get us on our toes right away, our teacher began class today with another quick pantomime exercise. Impromptu is definitely not my forte, but as I said earlier, I just need to learn how to wing it. This exercise was dinstinctly different, however, in that it was able to integrate Capo's theories at the same time. If you can remember, Capo believed that prior to performing a piece, one should experiment with a range of emotions until finding the one that suits the piece best. In place of our monologues, we were advised to create a short skit in pantomime where we displayed four distinct emotions. I'm not even sure how I happened upon my plot line, but it involed a lot of yawning on my part. Anyways, my character was dreaming away happily when all of a sudden some nightmare plagued her. She awakes unwillingly to go and brush her teeth, albeit half asleep. As she begins to wake up, she realizes that there's something wrong with the toothpaste. Horrified and frustrated at the same time, she rinses and tosses the toothpaste away only to realize that she is late for some engagement. Of all the pantomimes, though, I found my classmate's, Kim, pantomime to be the most cohesive yet simple. For some reason when I heard four distinct emotions, I immediately thought intricate, complicated plot. Kim's pantomime, however, showed me that something as simple as just waiting at a table can portray all the emotions necessary. I'll definitely keep that in mind the next time we improv.

As though Everyman has never died, we continued on once again in our discussion of the piece. Today, however, was more geared towards our pitches that we had whipped up this week utilizing Everyman as our stimulus. I particularly am excited about mine's and hope to possibly put it into action, but I'll save that for Monday when we will actually introduce them. Instead, we spent the rest of the class time to look over some pitches IB had previously provided our teacher with. Focusing mainly on content, our teacher guided us in the "how to's" and "what not to do's" of the assignment. One of the pitches was actually quite innovative in concept. It was based off of some play whose name I can't rember...something Andorra. Even without the name, though, I remember the student conveying that the play was all about people closing themselves in. To portray this almost hermetic seal, the student proposed pieces of glass set up to represent the imaginary 4th wall of the theater between the actors and the audience. Unbeknownst to the audience, the glass would be clear at the beginning only to be whitewashed through the development of the plot. Eventually the actors and audience members would be completely unable to see each other by the end. How interesting would that be?

He Doesn't Exist

Oh, the day I've been dreading has finally come and gone. Although I do enjoy performing, I find myself still incredibly self-conscious, especially if it involves a monologue. Unfortunately, that's just what I was required to perform today, a monologue of all things. Woe is me. I have no idea why I just said that considering that my monologue was not even remotely related to anything Shakespearean. Anyways, woe really is me. With most performances, I have a tendency to be so overwrought prior to the performance that I end up forgetting everything that I've previously learned, be it lines or blocking. Today, I felt especially unprepared, considering that I had not been working on the piece for that long. Still, as performance time crept closer and closer with the end of each period, I resolved to just wing it. Alk in all, the performance proceeded much smoother than I thought it would. At one point, however, I did have to ask for my line, but otherwise I was able to cover my tracks. With a considerably smaller number of students in my theater class, I felt as though it was easier to perform with less eyes on me. Upon completing my monologue, the class proceeded into crituques. Most of the comments I recieved had to do with the physicality of my environment and my display of emotions. The character within my piece was dealing with the death of her grandmother, and in the process blames God for his sadistic ways. Since I saw this piece previously performed, I almost felt as though I had to live up to the previous performance. Though I did not actually want my character to cry within the piece, I wanted to allude that by the end she is on the verge of tears. With a second attempt to peform the monologue once again next Monday, I hope that I will be able to discover all levels of the piece.

As I watched the other performances, I felt as though I was being transported back to the beginning of the year when we first saw each other's pantomimes. Once again, the concepts of pantomiming and blocking posed probably the biggest problems among the performances. Students would often limit or trap themselves by setting up their environment a certain way or even confuse the audience with inconsistent pantomiming. In the end, however, all performances, including mine, were largely mediocre.

With that, we began watching a video on medieval theater. Today, however, they focused specifically on the mystery playes. It would be quite interesting to be able to see a resurrection of any of the cycles in Britain right now. What with the pageant wagons in all their glory, requiring the audience only to wait in place for the next group of performers to comes. It was especially amazing to see various footage of these cycles and how the pageant wagons were structured. Reaching incredible heights, these pageant wagons often included a functioning second story. It seems practically impossible, and all within a wagon.

Who Are You, Again?

Personally, I feel as though some achievements or incredibly talented people are only able to see the light of day through our assignments. Take for instance our theorist reports. Now the theorist I was assigned with this time around was François Delsarte. Ring a bell at all? Not for me, anyways, but perhaps for those more cultured than I in the realms of the theater. If you're in any way culturally deficient like me, then let me fill you in on Monsieur Delsarte.

Born on November 9, 1811, Delsarte was raised in the French city of Solesmes. Delsarte's father, a practicing physician, was also often characterized as an eccentric inventor. Whenever his father did happen to produce some mechanical novelty, however, some swindler always seemed to be at hand to bilk his father out of any profits. Delsarte's education consequently suffered, and so he was directed towards an apprenticeship with a china painter. Though Delsarte's life was plagued by misfortune, this was an extremely trying time in his life considering the toll his younger brother's death took on him. With the death of his only friend, Delsarte fell into an almost comatose state soon after the funeral only to awaken later in a religious epiphany. Believing music to be his calling, Delsarte ended his apprenticeship to enroll at the Paris Conservatory. Through his vocal classes, however, Delsarte ended up damaging his voice from faulty method and direction. Hanging up his role as the actor, Delsarte became a professor at the Conservatory only to be frustrated by the arbitrary and prosaic way in which acting was taught.

From that point, Delsarte went on to create his own method in which he promoted connecting between inner emotional experiences with a prescribed set of gestures or movements. To do so, Delsarte studied and recorded how humans behaved, moved, and responded to emotional and real life situations or stimuli. As Delsarte enhanced performance through pose and gesture, he believed they were governed by some natural laws of the body and its movement. Delsarte especially emphasized the integration of speech, movement, and gesture in relation to the three major zones in the body. Through specialization of the head, trunk, and limbs, Delsarte helped actors to develop control, grace, poise, and carriage. This Delsarte Method or Delsarte System surprisingly became quite popular only to eventually decline to little more than melodramatic posing as inexperienced teachers attempted such instruction. Delsarte's innovations were late evolved to include gymnastics as his contemporary, Steel Mackaye, brought the process to the United States. What's interesting is that although Delsarte's theories seemingly replicate those of Stanislavsky, it is scientifically impossible considering that Delsarte preceded Stanislavsky in the time space continuum. Delsarte's career included other various accomplishments from creating and refining the aesthetic science to training singers and actors vocally.

When in came time to actually put Delsarte's theories into action through leading the class in an exercise, I found it particularly difficult to locate any pre-exsisting activities. In the end, I was forced to create my own, albeit somewhat lame, I thought it to be quite effective. As I fed lines to students, I encourage each individual to interpret the line personally and relate it to one of the many zones of the body in relation to the notions of life, soul, and mind. To see people actually utilizing Delsarte's theories really emphasized how difficult it was to implement his method into our own actions. At that point all I could think about was how I was going to do all this within my own monologue. Yikes!

Once done with our daily dose of theorist reports, our class when back to discussing the contents of Everyman. As we each summarized the moral of the play, I interpreted it as though the only thing that accompanies a person in death are the intangibles of life. Almost as though when all your physical possessions have lost their value, you are only left with your good deeds and knowledge. Throughout Everyman, there is a sense that Everyman was cognizant of his lack of good deeds in life, yet he continued in his ways.

With that, we moved on to discussing possibilities within creating our own morality play. As my teacher put it, we attempted to "present a moral for good's sake" instead of simply consequences governing good action. As we bounced ideas around, I found it quite interesting to explore the anti-morality play where a negatively connoted euphemism could be turned around and presented as a moral. This alternative morality play could even propose that affluence, though often frowned upon, is beneficial in the sense that it can get you places. We all know its true.

And We Begin Again

In our second round of theorist reports, today we heard from the works of Tadashi Suzuki and Capo (though I can't exactly remember his first name). Suzuki definitely stood out from the two, considering his unusual work with animalistic energy. As he emphasized the use of only the lower portion of the body, Suzuki specialized in pre-performance exercises that would establish some sort of connection between the actor and the ground. Through the "Suzuki Crouch", I felt that the entire class became painfully conscious of their bodies, ultimately the basis behind Suzuki's concept. Suzuki's innovative theories were apparently in response to the extravagance of the time embodied within the popular Noh and Kabuki theater. As Capo was being presented, everything I heard seemed oddly familiar. He especially stressed the integrity of the text, in the sense that the actor must stay true to the intent of the author. To perform the piece as the author intended, a performer must take it upon himself/herself to experiment the gamut of emotions possible with different sections of the piece until he/she finds the most suitable. Personally, though, it feels particularly time consuming to go through this process each time you are presented with a new text. But there's no harm in trying.

Afterwards, we picked back up with our discussion of Everyman. It was quite interesting to see that out of all the people to approach first after facing death, Everyman chooses his friends over his family. In effect, this essentially characterizes Everyman's shallowness. At first, it seems as though everyone or everything that Everyman confides in is willing to do practically anything for him, or so they say. When it finally comes down to death, however, everyone and everything abandons him with the exception of his good deeds and knowledge. Goods even goes as far to taunt Everyman for actually believing in the loyalty of money. As morals are presented, each one is associated with a different attitude. Quite innovative for something produced in the 18th century...

Everyman?

Upon ending our unit on Greek Theater, class today mainly focused going back to the generic timeline following the progression of theater. We touched once again upon the Romans and their interpretation of theater after conquering the Greeks. For the most part everything sounded pretty familiar considering that we had discussed the subject before. The only truly new information I absorbed was the entire spiel regarding mythology, not just any mythology but Roman mythology. The entire Roman concept of the Pantheon was truly interesting in that religion was centered around practically a group of gods. This notion contributed to the later persecution of Christians in Rome due to their admonishment of the Pantheon because obviously their God was alone in his power.

From there we progressed to the Dark Ages during which the Church possessed power, eventually out of which the period of Medieval theater was born. As theater of that time was largely divided into the morality and the mystery/miracle play, our teacher thought it would be a timely opportunity to practice our devising skills, as green as they were. In preparation for creating our own morality play, today our class began reading through Everyman. The components of a miracle play are especially unique in the sense that the protagonist represents the greater majority of society while supporting characters take on personfications of abstract notions. In Everyman specifically, Everyman literally portrays "every man" in their inevitable journey towards death. Though we've only started a cold reading of the script I can't wait until we get the chance to modernize our own version of a morality play. The only thing that's irking me is the recreation of the language style typical of the morality play. Although it's not particularly rhyme-y, a certain grasp of sound and meter are required. As if devising wasn't already hard enough as it is...

Monkey See, Monkey Do?

To build upon the exercise that we attempted last week, we were assigned another seemingly simplex task today. Last time it was basically leading the blind through the obstacle course that is our school, but today we were left to lead each other in re-creating pictures that our teacher had cunningly whipped up for us. When we first heard the assignment it sounded like a breeze, until we actually saw the pictures that we would have to describe to our classmates. Full of geometric shapes, dimensions, lines, squiggles, and basically everything under the moon was attempted within these pictures.

Through group rotations everyone had the opportunity to experience the exercise from the leader's point of view and from that of the recipient who drew according to the leader's directions. The result of our pictures were especially dependent upon the cognitive skills (i'm not sure if cognitive's the word, but basically the individual's ability to translate and associate images with other images or words) of the leader, otherwise the entire picture just turned out as a big jumble. Still, to a certain extent, the assignment required a certain level of knowledge of each participant because often times in order to convey the picture many of us had to rely upon mathematical concepts like the unit circle and such. By the end of our exercise, most of the pictures we produced were relatively similar to that of the original.

Personally, when it came time to actually describe my picture to another classmate, I felt as though I recieved the most complicated example of all. Throughout the entire process you had to keep reiterating yourself in order to make sure that you and the "drawer" were on the same page. Though direction taking and giving probably isn't as complicated as this exercise, it once again emphasizes the specificity and detail required of all our directions in order to be able to translate an idea from our head onto the stage.

By the way, the first picture of each group represents the prescribed image that we were suppose to recreate from oral directions. The second picture of each group was my personal interpretation of the directions. And the last picture (the hardest one) was the one that I had to describe for another classmate.

The Blind Leading the Blind

Everytime I hear the words "trust exercise" I think of that scene from Mean Girls when Gretchen, a nasty gossip monger, inadvertently ridicules everyone else by speaking the truth and ends up falling flat onto her friend who is the only one there to catch her. However, with only five students in our class now, I believe that exercise might have been a little bit too much to handle. Instead, our teacher decided to send us out into the campus in small groups to lead a blind-folded classmate. Each of us took turns being the blind or the guide. Being able to experience both roles, I felt as though they completely changed our perception of everything. Obviously when you are stripped of your vision you tend to behave a bit meeker, possibly even introverted.

At that time, all your attention is focused towards listening to the voices of your guides and paying heed to any changes in the environment that you could possibly get a sense of. Smell actually became of a great use to myself because my guides thought it would be quite hilarious to send me blindly into the boy's bathroom. Prior to entering the bathroom I had bumped into something quite cold and hard (which was actually the door to the bathroom) and realized that something must have been going on. It wasn't until I had smelled the stench oozing from the boy's bathroom that I realized where I must have been. At a later time, my guides once again tricked me into walking into a classroom. Low and behold this time my sense of hearing came to the rescue and saved me before I actually made it all the way into the classroom. What tipped me off was the noise that the ramp leading to the classroom was making as I made my way up. Throughout the entire experience this sense of foreboding plagued me when I was apparently walking in completely wide open spaces. This shadow of paranoia made me feel as though there was always something within a few feet that would knock me down any minute. It was the most bizarre feeling I've ever felt before!

Now functioning as a guide was a feeling completely the antithesis of everything I've been talking about. It felt oddly empowering to know that another person was depending on you to tell them everything from the grade of the ground to the changes in terrain. With a close group of friends during this exercise, we all felt it was inevitable to play a joke or two on each other. For one of our classmate's we decided to take her up to the soccer field where we almost had her walk through mud. Unfortunately I misjudged the distance and instead I was the one who stepped in it. In the end, however, all the power gradually became somewhat of a burden. Minor things we would never notice regularly suddenly became integrally important for the blind to simply walk a few feet or up a flight of stairs.

This awareness of our surroundings becomes somewhat second nature in theater as actors become accustomed to the certain height of steps or the layout of the stage. However if something as minor as an uneven step were to be changed, the entire flow of the show would be disturbed. This experience, I believe, contributes to the whole process of the director-actor relationship in which blocking is established. It isn't that the director is leading the actor blindly, per se, so much as the director is guiding the actor through the correct motions. Let's hope that in this case, it isn't the blind leading the blind...

Research Questions 101

It seems too good to be true, but two movies in a week! Today's presentation was definitely different from that of Oedipus Rex and strangely informative and interesting, at least for me. Although somewhat informally produced, the video followed the investigation of a British dramturg, I believe, in his search for the missing Roman theater set that fell chronologically between certain periods of theater. To do so, the dramaturg actually visited Rome to pore over the paintings within various official buildings (Caesar's palace, etc.) to learn more about the set of comedic plays. It was quite amazing to see him derive from simple and dissipating wall paintings the different functional aspects of overhanging roofs and colonnades in the distant background depicted. Eventually the dramaturg was able to reconstruct a functional prototype of this theater set to which he subjected the action of a real comedic play.

Though extreme this example may seem to be, it really helped in illustrating how to go about formulating a research question and what it entails of each of us. I'm just bouncing around some ideas, but possible research topics...

• Theater construction (evolution from Greek to modern)
• Greek mythology (effects in theater possibly)
• Evolution of the role of chorus/choirs in theater

Executive Decision

So for the past couple of days our class has come to focus specifically on the role of the director. The role of the director as a functional linchpin who basically has to stick his or her fingers in just about everyone's affairs. Digressing from our main topic of Greek Theater, we were able to form a connection between that of a more arcane performance with something very familiar and modern for many of us. Upon completing Oedipus Rex today, we took some time to emphasize the differences we noticed between the text and that of the actual movie. Probably the most major inconsistency that a classmate picked up on were the ending words of the Chorus. In the movie version of Oedipus, the Chorus seems to go on and reiterate that:

Look, ye who dwell in Thebes. This man was Oedipus.
That mighty King, who knew the riddle's mystery.
Whom all the city envied, Fortune's favorite.
Behold, in the event, the storm of his calamities,
And, being mortal, think on that last day of death,
Which all must see, and speak of no man's happiness
Till, without sorrow, he hath passed the goal of life.

These words poignantly marked the ending of the play in the movie, yet upon reading the literal text of Oedipus we almost felt left hanging. Originally in our version translated by H. D. F. Kitto, he himself make the executive decision to leave out these last words. Few other scholars share Professor Kitto's suspicion that the concluding lines in the manuscript are spurious. And thus the ending passage was thus translated by J. T. Sheppard.

Still, however, this all goes back to the notion of the executive decision which often involves the choice between inclusion or exclusion of certain material. The same goes for contemporaries of the arts such as Shakespeare and Mozart themselves. In regards to Shakespeare specifically, his plays were only later published as a result of random collections of existing scrips from his previous plays. As is demonstrated by the Sly character of Macbeth, portions of Shakespeare's texts were either missing or rewritten to the extent that no one truly knew to which the title of the finally copy went to. Therefore it is now left to the task of modern directors to figure out a way to utilize such abrupt portions due to errors in either printing or existence. Sophocles, too, went through a similar creative process in the sense that he had to choose from the wealth of oral mythology to form his own story.

Some choices that directors must make during the creative process are...

• How many actors will be involved?
• What is the functional size of the stage?
• What is the general concept (ex. play within a play)?
• Will there be a prevalent theme or style?

Movie Day

As we continue on with Oedipus Rex, the entire concept just seems to draw less and less attention. Maybe it's that we're becoming desensitized to the overpowering qualities characteristic of Greek theater, but it no longer seems innovative. Reactions and movements are typically slow and almost ritualistic. Acting seems to occur sporadically at times, bursting in and out of even anachronistic emotions. It all goes back, however, to the style in which Greek theater was supposedly performed in. Perhaps it is simply that our modern times cannot really relate to the mediatated and calculated actions and speaking of the play. What, I believe, seems to keep my classmates and I still interested are the almost awkward moments of the play. At times like those you can't help but chuckle at the absurdity of the entire situation. For example there was this one scene where Oedipus and Iocasta were basically alone on stage. I believe it was at the point when Oedipus was admitting his fears to his wife and she was attempting to comfort him. Instead of the consolation that mnay of us expected, Iocasta and Oedipus proceeded through this breathy, prolonged monologue that just seemed completely out of character. Can anyone tell me what that was all about?

The Poetics

Towards the beginning of the school year, my class was assigned these sort of on-going activities all related to Greek theater. Although there were really only two, Sophocles's Oedipus the King and Aristotle's The Poetics, it has taken quite a time to thoroughly go through and discuss the many factors at work. Just yesterday we began our evaluation of Aristotle's The Poetics and how the entire manifesto came into being. While I was reading through the document, I never even realized that Aristotle and Sophocles were from completely different time periods. It was only when Greek theater was truly dead that Aristotle attempted to revive the entire concept. In doing so, Aristotle based his outline of the Greek tragedy solely on the story of Oedipus (which he apparently felt was the epitome of tragedy). With so little resources of Greek theater available, even today, it makes you wonder whether Aristotle was really right in his thinking. Ever since his Poetics were published, they have essentially been treated as the Holy Grail of Greek theater, thus dictating anything that will ever come after it. Although I do agree upon some of Aristotle's basics conducive of a tragedy, I'm not completely sold on the whole "no subplots" idea. I almost feel as though stories need to have some sort of context or digression to truly make it whole. But that is neither here nor there.

Today in class we also began watching Tyrone Guthrie's famous production of Oedipus Rex. The movie really helped us to put in context the entire knowledge of Greek theater that we have been accumulating over the past weeks. By that time we had read about Greek theater, experimented with choral roles, and just about everything else besides actually viewing some authentic Greek theater. Although this production of Oedipus Rex is technically not authentic, it's pretty darn close. Everything from masks to the style of acting were preserved uncannily well. From what we've watched so far, I can assuredly say that it's truly not like anything we've done before. Actions, sounds, and emotions are just so over the top, it almost feels uncomfortable to be watching the actors at certain points. But that's the Greeks for you, right?